I Return
by stella8h8chang
Summary: Albus has no choice but to return to Nurmengard after a fifty-year absence. Set during Order of the Phoenix.


**A/N: ****_Je Reviens I Return_. I own neither the ships from _Harry Potter _nor those from _Rebecca _nor _Rent_.  
**

Don't let the solemnity of the title and the first few lines fool you. It had me fooled at first, until a little fairy landed on my shoulder and told me, "It's high time you stopped writing angst and tried something else!" So here I've made a feeble attempt at something funny. This is another epilogue-that-nearly-was of _Tempus_, until I got the ridiculous ideas that came into my head after "_O__ Albus, I know you're here!_" Like everything I write, it has its fluffy and angsty and geeky moments. I have a very weird sense of humour.

* * *

**"****Where will you go, Dumbledore?" whispered Professor McGonagall. "Grimmauld Place?"  
"Oh no," said Dumbledore, with a grim smile, "I am not leaving to go into hiding. Fudge will**** soon wish he'd never dislodged me from Hogwarts, I promise you."**

_**Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix**_**: The Centaur and the Sneak)**

Albus Dumbledore felt a rush of pride that he could still pull off a neat Intercontinental Apparition as he landed in front of a great German castle. This building of black stone should have buoyed this sensation, since it stood as a monument to one of his greatest achievements according to the history textbooks, but instead it made Dumbledore's heart sink. Nurmengard was a place which had been designed to hold nightmares. But at the moment, Dumbledore needed to face his nightmares, to search through the biggest library of Dark Magic in Europe for answers, with the precious spare time Fudge had inadvertently handed him.

"_O Albus! I know you're here!_" said an annoying little voice in his head. _Don't be ridiculous. __Legilimency only works via eye contact._ _Shut up_, thought Dumbledore, shocking himself. The words "shut up" had not entered his head for perhaps a century.

_Oh really, you say, then why is it that you're answering me?_

Dumbledore took the stairs on the right, following them up to a grand room whose candles lit themselves when he entered. He strode over to the immense curved bookshelves and selected a number of ancient volumes: _Secrets of the Darkest Art_, _Beyond the Veil_ and _An Autobiography of Herpo the Foul_. He had just settled down in one of the velvet-covered chairs at the long, narrow, hard wooden table, when he heard a voice rattle from the neighbouring turret.

"O Albus! I know you're here! The lights are on in the library!"

Dumbledore sighed. He knew he would have to face his demon some time or another. The books could wait for him at Hogwarts.

He retraced his steps, and chose the left-hand staircase this time.

"We meet again at last," said the voice.

Dumbledore tapped the door in front of him three times with his wand, rendering it transparent.

"Fifty years it's been since I last saw your face," said Gellert Grindelwald, the last prisoner of Nurmengard. His once-handsome cheeks had been hollowed out by deprivation and time, his blonde curls were now dark and matted, and his skin had the greyish tinge of one who had neither sun nor soap. He splayed his wasted palm against the glassy door in front of him.

Dumbledore hesitated.

"Well?" asked Gellert, raising his eyebrow, then tossing his wild head back and shaking out his shaggy mane, just as he might have done a million summers before. "Do you remember me?"

_Do you remember?_

"Do you remember, Albus, do you remember, coming back to Godric's Hollow after you showed me Diagon Alley on the day of your birthday? How we were planning to go back another day and see _La Boheme_ together in London?"

"And how you dragged me down Knockturn Alley?" asked Albus irritably.

Gellert tried another approach. "Remember the time I tried to explain the difference between Parmenidean and Heraclitean time dressed in a bedsheet?"

"I think you designed it so that it would be etched on my memory forever." He was mellowing.

Gellert laughed. "I find it amazing to think that according to that temporal model, somewhere in time, we're doing exactly that."

Albus struggled to maintain an air of severity. "Somewhere, or should I say, some_when_, you are letting your hot-headedness get the better of you, and committing crimes that will see you to your current lodgings."

"Somewhere, Albus, I am thrusting my hips against you, and my –"

"Oh, don't be so immature," said Albus, slightly flippantly.

"Says the fellow who can't hear the word 'cock' without collapsing in a fit of giggles."

Albus sighed. "God gave man one appendage on his head and one between his legs, and enough blood to supply only one at a time."

"It's just like you to say something like that! Well, what _is_ so wrong with that? I wouldn't want to _think_ when…"

"Gellert! Shut up!"

"There was a time when I would have snogged you senseless if you had dared to say that to me. You want silence?"

There was indeed an awkward silence.

"Let me guess, you've started shagging that Slughorn chap or something."

"WHAT?"

"That's more like it! C'mon! I wanna hear you shout!" Gellert took a step back. He began to prance around his cell and (what was much worse) to sing. "Take me…Oooooout tonight! Let's go Ooooouuuut tonight! I have to go… Ooooout tonight! You wanna prowl, be my night owl, well take my hand we're gonna…Hoooooooowl tonight!"

"You're mad," said Albus, as Gellert punched the air in front of him, and found that the glass wall stretched as his fist collided with it, like a fly hitting a spider's web.

Gellert drew his hand back from the queer cross between liquid and solid and pondered for a moment, perhaps marvelling at Albus' invention of unbreakable glass.

He spoke once more. "You would be too, if you'd been locked up for fifty years and starved of human contact. Besides, I hear people call _you_ that nevertheless."

Albus' eyes began to feel a bit wet.

"Good grief, you _are_ shagging Slughorn. Or no, he's probably too young for you. It's Alastor, isn't it? Alastor Moody?"

"Alastor?!" Albus burst out without thinking. "He's lost one of his legs, one of his eyes and a bit of his nose...after you set my standards...well...and besides, I haven't been able to look at him in the same way since we were roommates, and I accidentally opened one of his drawers and found it contained a quantity of whips, handcuffs and dog-collars."

Suddenly the two of them were laughing again; it was as if ninety-five years had just faded into oblivion.

Voldemort had not been reborn, or born at all in the first place. The first war had not happened. Ariana had not…

"So _that's_ how he got all his scars," said Gellert, still chuckling. "I always did wonder why he'd never bothered to Heal himself properly after getting into a squabble. I used to put it down to the quality of teaching at Hogwarts."

_Hogwarts…_

"Speaking of Hogwarts, I will be taking the liberty of removing several books from your library," said Dumbledore, at last. "They may never be returned," said Dumbledore. "They may make the school their permanent home."

Grindelwald groaned. "Take them."

"I thought the least I could do would be to make it into an exchange." Dumbledore sensed Grindelwald's end was close, and thought he might be able to ease his passing. The overseers who made occasional visits to Nurmengard would hardly care if their charge was lost in a good book or some good music.

"What would I want with magic books? If this is an attempt to rub…"

"Not magic books," said Dumbledore. "I have the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide's _L'immoraliste_, Virgina Woolf's _Orlando_, Tchaikovsky's discography and Daphne du Maurier's _Rebecca_."

"_Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley_," quoted Grindelwald.

"That's it."

Gellert Grindelwald looked him straight in the eye; the blues and greens of his eyes had yet to fade along with the colour in his hair and complexion. "And the ship, _Je Reviens_."

* * *

**A/N: **If you're as geeky as me, you'll have noticed Albus' list is made up of LGBTQ artists' works. I had to do an assignment on homosexuality, and I uncovered the list on wiki. Which was tres cool. I am actually French-illiterate; my pretentious use of the language in period fics is all parroted from Wikipedia or novels like du Maurier's. 

I'll leave it to your imagination whether the bit in the middle really happened, or whether it was all in their heads (but does that make it any less real?)

I wrote this when _Tempus_ was giving me so much frustration that I felt ready to throw the lot into the bin. Hurrah for procrastinatory material! And hurrah for the song "Out Tonight" from RENT the musical! Before editing, I had Dumbledore giving Grindelwald a bootleg DVD of RENT, except then I remembered how electricity doesn't work around magic :P


End file.
